Miami Road A Son's Memoir

I enjoyed this book enormously. Written with a remarkable combination of frankness and love. A family story well told." -Michael Korda, author and former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster When Jerry Kirshenbaum's family moved into a grand house on fashionable Miami Road in Benton Harbor, Michigan, life was comfortable but not always peaceful. Beneath a serene surface lay the screaming fits of an unhappy mother, the sufferings of a beloved handicapped sister and a long-buried crime committed by the author's immigrant father, a truck-driving, cigar-chomping burlap bag merchant and poker player known as Mook. Mook was a man of charisma and contradiction - equal parts hard-bitten and folksy, profane and profound. The story of his ascent from poverty to the splendor of Miami Road is shadowed on every page by a question: Where did he find the strength to get through love, loss and his own failings? Miami Road is a vivid, often funny portrait of resilience set against the backdrop of Chicago's once heavily Jewish West Side and Benton Harbor, a raucous Midwestern town whose rise and fall parallels Mook's ups and downs.